Measuring experience has become commonplace in our everyday lives. Organisations including government agencies, retailers, airports, online stores and service providers measure the level of service they provide via surveys. This allows them to quantify the experience they are delivering so they can identify how to improve their service. KPIs and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) help them identify how they're performing. Consumers know they have choice, and an organisation that provides a poor experience may mean they move to a competitor.
The last few years has seen a greater emphasis placed on Employee Experience by many organisations. The "Great Resignation" and skills shortages has meant that attracting and retaining staff has never been more important. The pandemic and shift to fully remote work, and the subsequent move to hybrid work has created new challenges in building a company culture. In recent years there has been a growing number of organisations employing a Chief Experience Officer (CXO), whose role does not necessarily fall under the People and Culture or HR department. This role is given the remit not only to focus on client experience, but also to ensure that the organisation places an emphasis on employee experience. Employee experience begins from a candidate's first interaction with the organisation, through the interviewing process, onboarding, throughout their time with the business, the benefits and incentives available to them, and then their experience when they depart. All of these touchpoints affect the employee's perception of the organisation and will impact the messages they convey about the business. The CXO will not only look at processes adopted throughout the various touchpoints with their employees, they are also responsible for technologies and systems the organisation uses that affects employee experience.
One of the greatest impacts to an employee's experience in their role is technology. This is where Digital Employee Experience (DEX) comes in. Digital Employee Experience is a reflection of how effectively people interact with their workplace digital tools, which allows them to be engaged, proficient, and productive (aihr.com). By optimising the digital components of Employee Experience, organisations can create a workplace where their employees prosper and achieve key business outcomes. By delivering a great Digital Employee Experience, the organisation can benefit in numerous ways -
Improved employee satisfaction: When employees are not hindered by technology issues, they are more likely to be happier and more engaged
Increased productivity: Providing staff the ability to access their applications from any location and any device allows them to be more efficient and complete their work faster
Attract and retain talent: If staff are having issues with their digital experience, they may get frustrated and look at moving on. A frictionless digital experience will allow staff to focus on their role and produce the outcomes expected of them
Higher client satisfaction: Engaged employees are more likely to provide a higher level of customer service to their clients, leading to happier clients
Reduced costs: Focusing on Digital Employee Experience allows organisations to reduce costs by optimising hardware and software assets, ensuring staff have the right device and right applications for their role
The last ten to fifteen years has seen technology become prominent in every aspect of our lives. Along with this, there has been a strong focus by large technology vendors to ensure this is delivered with excellent service and a seamless experience. The hardware and software platforms we use will regularly ask us for our feedback so they can quantify our experience and identify how to make improvements. IT departments no longer just have a "Service Desk", they now also have a "Tech Bar", "Genius Bar", "Tech Hub" etc, where staff can walk up with their device and get help instantly. It's no longer acceptable to ask staff to log a ticket and wait days for a response, they expect their corporate devices to work just like the devices they purchase from a retailer.
You don't know what you don't know
One of the challenges of the IT department is that they have traditionally operated in a reactive model. It's not until an employee reports an issue via the Service Desk or ITSM platform that they're made aware of an issue. With hybrid and remote work, this is even more challenging, as staff can no longer just walk up to the Service Desk or Tech Bar to get help. They need to log into the ITSM platform or phone the Service Desk. If a key application has an outage, the Service Desk might receive the same ticket or phone call numerous times, quickly reducing their capacity to service the organisation. Troubleshooting an issue can jump from team to team. Quite often we see various IT teams pointing the finger at each other as to the cause of an issue. Meanwhile the employees have to wait for a resolution, checking the Intranet or their emails for a notification their application is available again.
That always happens, I just put up with it.
If you've ever worked on a Service Desk or in Desktop Support, you've probably heard an end user say this. You help them out with their device and notice an issue, it could be an application crashing. They don't have the time to log a ticket, so they just restart their computer, or close the application and reopen it. It's not until IT sees the issue that it's resolved, in the meantime the employee's productivity is impacted and they are frustrated by technology issues.
IT at our company is useless
Most people have probably heard someone say this to them, particularly if they work in IT. IT departments are continually having to deliver more with less, receiving less of the budget each year and having to sweat their assets for longer. Yet technology is getting more complex, the boom in cloud services means IT no longer has control over application performance as there are additional moving parts. Employees working remotely means that rather than just five or ten offices, the organisation now has hundreds or thousands of offices. It's easy for employees to blame IT, when remote work could mean its a home Internet connection or poor Wi-Fi network that is the cause of issues.
How can DEX help us?
Adopting a DEX platform allows the IT department to understand in real time what is happening across their IT estate, regardless of the location of the devices. By collecting actual usage data from their devices, IT can gain an understanding of any issues across the fleet. The data can allow IT to measure and quantify the performance of the IT assets to focus on where they can gain the most improvements. They no longer have to wait for employees to report an issue, they can see what is happening and fix it proactively. This enables employees to be more productive, increases employee engagement and allow the organisation to achieve its outcomes faster, and at lower cost.
However we don't get a full picture of what is happening across the IT fleet just from the device data we collect, also known as hard metrics. We need to supplement the hard metrics with the employee's sentiment so we understand how the employees feel about their Digital Employee Experience. If an employee believes their device is running poorly however the usage data shows otherwise, we have an expectation gap where we need to identify how to close that gap. Is it via training, or managing expectations? Or do we need to show an employee that their home network is the cause of their performance issues?
Why Nexthink?
Our team has over 20 years of experience working in the End User Computing and IT infrastructure space. Over the last five years we have seen the significance of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) platforms becoming a critical piece of the IT department's strategy. It's no longer acceptable to have just a Tech Bar, employees expect their issues to be fixed quickly, regardless of their location. We have seen the Nexthink platform develop and evolve to become the leading DEX platform. Its automation capabilities, employee engagement features and rich, insightful data allows IT to make data driven decisions and focus on the improvements that will benefit their employees. Nexthink truly allows IT to move from the reactive support model, to a proactive support model. The Nexthink platform is valuable to all teams across IT, not just the Service Desk and Desktop Support. It can provide insights to your network and security teams, your application teams, and your infrastructure teams. It endows your teams with the evidence to make accurate decisions while reducing costs.
In our next post we'll talk about why your organisation should have a DEX strategy and the benefits of adopting a DEX platform. Until then, feel free to post your comments. And if you'd like to know more about DEX, contact us, we'd love to have a discussion with you over a coffee!
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